Once upon a time, three Planet Hollywood gift shops thrived on Walt Disney World property, not counting the actual crash-landed planet in the middle of Downtown Disney. It even had an outlet store on International Drive. Earlier this year, the last dedicated gift shop in town, just shy of three-years-old, closed to make way for a chicken finger sauce bar. Down the street, Hard Rock Café renewed its long-time lease to keep their crown-jewel real estate at Universal Orlando through 2039.
There weren’t many survivors of the Great Theme Restaurant Wars. That might seem like a grim assessment, especially talking about a town that still has a House of Blues, a Bubba Gump Shrimp Company, and two Rainforest Cafes on the same bus line, but consider the fallen.
A tough time
Both the World Wrestling Federation and World Championship Wrestling launched restaurants. Both were shuttered by 2003, despite the promise of dining inside the famous steel cage. Dick Clark tried his hand at the music-based food market with a chain of American Bandstand Grills. The last Bandstand closed in Branson just a few years ago. Steven Spielberg bet big on the hope that tourists wanted to eat inside a submarine. Zagat compared Dive! Deep – See – Experience to “eating inside a pinball machine.” Despite hopes for 60 locations worldwide, only two were built.
For every chain you can still find at the odd mall somewhere in the Midwest, four or five weren’t so lucky, most of which the average joe never noticed come or go. But there are only two chains that soared high enough to cement their names as eternal short-hand for the theme restaurant craze, regardless of how hard they landed afterward.
In 1971, mop-headed Americans Isaac Tigrett and Peter Morton founded the first Hard Rock Café in a an old Rolls Royce dealership in Mayfair, London. They just wanted a place to eat hamburgers that reminded them of home. The first live performance came in 1973, when Paul McCartney & Wings decided to warm up at the Café on a whim. The following year, the restaurant printed its first run of the company’s now-ubiquitous t-shirts, originally intended as uniforms for a local soccer team. But it wouldn’t be until 1979, though, that they created the themed restaurant as we know it, when they started bolting rock and roll artifacts to the walls. Or rather, when Eric Clapton hung his guitar over his favorite barstool and Pete Townshend mailed his own to one-up him.
Last one standing
The London original remained the only Hard Rock Café into the early ‘80s, becoming a hot-spot for young movers-and-shakers like themed-restaurant-connoisseur Steven Spielberg as he wrapped up Raiders of the Lost Ark at nearby Elstree Studios. Expansion was inevitable, but Tigrett the rockstar and Morton the businessman had differing opinions on the direction.
After a laborious legal process, the solution was geographic. Tigrett’s Hard Rock Café International, Inc. could do what it wanted with the brand east of the Mississippi and Morton’s Hard Rock America, Inc. could do what it wanted to the west. In 1982, Morton managed to open their first all-American burger joint in America with Hard Rock Café Los Angeles. The star-power backing of Hollywood royalty and proven Hard Rock fan Steven Spielberg didn’t hurt. But Tigrett wasn’t far behind with Hard Rock Café New York City in 1984, with the support of eventual-theme-restauranteur Dan Aykroyd.
Competition
Over the next several years, the former partners duked it out in their respective districts, with unauthorized copycats biting at their international heels. It wasn’t until a stock market plunge in late 1987 that the players changed and Tigrett sold Hard Rock Café International to Robert Earl, an enterprising force in food-service with 70 restaurants to his name at the time.
The spiritual Tigrett made out with about $30 million, moved to India so he could spend it building hospitals, and returned to co-found House of Blues in 1992.
Earl, meanwhile, had half a globe to stamp with the Hard Rock Café logo. It didn’t take him long to look at the biggest tourist market on the east coast that didn’t come with a Statue of Liberty.
Robert Earl approached Disney chairman Michael Eisner about opening a Hard Rock Café on company soil. The earliest plans for Pleasure Island, Eisner’s notorious experiment in nightclub entertainment, were announced in 1986. It wouldn’t open until 1989. There was time for a Hard Rock Café to sneak in somewhere, and what better complement to the up-all-night attitude they were looking for?
A missed opportunity
Eisner passed. In his book Work in Progress: Risking Failure, Surviving Success, he remembers it as a learning experience, if not exactly a fun one. “’We can do our own rock’n’roll themed restaurant,’ I told our group.”
Not long after, Earl went to the competition. Universal, still building its $650 million experiment up I-4, was only too eager to hear a pitch from a proven brand. They offered Earl a prime spot within the park and outside the bounds. Earl chose both.
It would be more than just the first Hard Rock Café at Universal Studios Florida, with entrances from both the park and the parking lot. As the 13th outpost in the world, Hard Rock Café Orlando was the first ever built from the ground up and the largest by a mile, with four times the seating of the London original. From the pavement, it looked grand enough, but for incoming passengers in the sky above, it was a 300-foot-long guitar, with a footbridge across the highway forming its neck. It wasn’t just a restaurant – it was a mission statement you could read from low orbit. Hard Rock was Universal and Universal was Hard Rock.
The deal paid off to the tune of 5,000 paying customers a day, becoming the chain’s most successful outpost not long after opening on June 7th, 1990.
Good news for Earl. Frustrating news for Morton, who’d already been butting heads with him over licensing. They jointly owned the Hard Rock Licensing Corporation, which determined what would and would not be getting stamped with the already-famous logo. Earl wanted to keep expanding as fast as possible. Morton did not, at least not at Earl’s pace. Even Tigrett chimed in from the sidelines, warning Earl that he was wearing out the brand.
Earl took his advice and made a new one on the side. Bryan Kestner, a 20-something entrepreneur and day-player in The Running Man, originally called his concept “Café Hollyrock.” Keith Barish, producer of The Running Man and a whole lot more, didn’t like the name, but he liked the idea, enough to contact somebody that knew the theme restaurant business.
In 1991, the first Planet Hollywood opened in New York City, exactly one block away from the Hard Rock Café. Investors-turned-ambassadors Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, Demi Moore, and Whoopi Goldberg provided the necessary red-carpet cache.
A little too much of it, for Morton. He saw no difference between a restaurant that hung guitars on the walls and a restaurant that hung screen-used guitars on the walls. Earl, with a straight face, assured the press, “You’ll find zero similarity.”
Peter Morton disagreed, filing a $1.5 billion lawsuit against Earl and the Rank Organization, which had absorbed Earl’s company just before the Planet Hollywood launch. The style of restaurant was one thing, but since Planet Hollywood wasn’t under the Hard Rock umbrella, Earl could theoretically build them west of the Mississippi. Say, right next door to one of Morton’s Hard Rock Cafes.
Robert Earl wasn’t worried. In December of 1992, he let his contract as the head of Hard Rock International, Inc. lapse. The following year, two new Planet Hollywoods opened and five more were planned. The year after that, a chain of dedicated retail stores, “Planet Hollywood Superstores,” opened just to handle the merchandise demand. The brand was explosive among the tourist set. When Earl set his sights on double-sized locations in proportionally heavy markets, he already knew who to call.
Eisner didn’t hesitate this time when Earl pitched him on bringing Planet Hollywood to Walt Disney World. Much like his competitors did with their competitors, the Disney chairman gave Planet Hollywood its biggest location yet.
A massive undertaking
Though it matched the Las Vegas outpost in dining room seats – 500, as opposed to the usual 250 – the Downtown Disney location was the first scratch-built as, well, a planet. But that wasn’t all. As something of a herald for the restaurant, a Planet Hollywood Superstore opened on Sunset Boulevard in Disney’s MGM-Studios six months earlier. A little shop for last-minute souvenirs and dinner reservations was situated at the foot of the restaurant’s long stairway. You couldn’t miss it – a Godzilla-sized statue of a Godzilla-homage mascot constantly revolved on the roof. When the West Side was added to Downtown Disney in 1997, another retail store came with it, Planet Hollywood – On Location, in what is now the Star Wars Galactic Outpost.
Like Hard Rock Café four years earlier, Planet Hollywood Orlando immediately became one of the highest earning locations in the chain when it opened on December 18th, 1994. The Disney agreement included plans for future Planets at Disneyland, Disneyland Paris, Tokyo Disneyland, and the infamously cancelled Disney’s America. At the groundbreaking ceremony, Sylvester Stallone said it as only Sly can: “Mickey Mouse pulled off his ears and put two hamburgers up there.”
Only Disneyland Paris got its own Planet Hollywood. As of this writing, the Disney locations amount for almost 30% of the remaining restaurants.
For four years, Orlando was home to the ultimate Planet Hollywood and the ultimate Hard Rock Café, each an overblown, overpriced treatise on their respective brands as they steamrolled into the ‘90s.
Hard Rock Café was a pub from the day it was born. Dark-stained wood. Dim enough for friendly conspiracy. Loud music and an optimally placed bar. But Hard Rock, at least by Tigrett’s definition, was about more than just the physical. The exterior looked like a cathedral. The two-story dining room featured dueling triptychs of rock royalty in stained glass. The ceiling was adorned with a rotunda fresco straight out of a state courthouse. The Hard Rock Café Orlando was everything Hard Rock Café stood for, writ large.
With a house style established by Batman production designer Anton Furst, Planet Hollywood had no architectural analogue. It was equal parts art deco spaceship, Egyptian temple, and Memphis-print hell. The walls crawled with blown-up cutouts of Hollywood landmarks, demented for effect. Full-size buses and boats and other props big enough to crush a party of four dangled from the starfield ceiling on wires too tiny to spot. Planet Hollywood, at its dizzying height, looked like a museum done up for a Duran Duran music video, forever stuck mid-explosion. It was, in a word, loud, and the Walt Disney World flagship was louder than the rest; a “life-size” Woody, about as tall as the average colonial home, dangled his denim legs over the third floor elevator for 22 years.
Hard Rock Café Orlando didn’t last that long, at least not in its original form.
Encouraged in part by the restaurant’s enduring success, Universal included a plum new location for Hard Rock in the plans for “E-Zone,” the shopping-dining-dancing complex that would turn their lonely park into a resort. Another possible tenant was the Official All Star Café, a sports-themed Planet Hollywood off-shoot developed by Robert Earl in 1995. When Universal announced Shaq’s Place instead, later replaced on the drawing board by Margaritaville when Shaquille O’Neal left the Orlando Magic, All Star was off the table.
Michael Eisner was more than willing to say yes to Earl again. An Official All Star Café opened with Disney’s Wide World of Sports Complex in 1997.
A changing world
In 1998, the original Hard Rock Café Orlando closed. Planet Hollywood diversified its empire with its own chain of music-themed restaurants with the help of MTV, a chain of ice cream shops, and Marvel Mania at Universal Studios Hollywood, a non-starter attempt at a chain based on the then-struggling comic book company’s heroes and villains.
In 1999, the new Hard Rock Café Orlando opened at the newly rechristened CityWalk, with its own live music venue attached. The “Kingdom of Rock” had been replaced by the “Colosseum of Rock.” Meanwhile, Planet Hollywood filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
In 2000, Disney bought their Official All Star Café outright. Schwarzenegger washed his hands of Planet Hollywood.
In 2001, the third Hard Rock Hotel in the world opened just a boat ride away from the Hard Rock Café Orlando. Disney’s All Star Café was already the last in business, single-handedly keeping the brand alive for another six years.
At its peak, Planet Hollywood claimed over a hundred locations around the world. There are only seven left, 11 if you count the company’s four resorts.
Hard Rock Café hasn’t peaked yet, with 185 restaurants, 25 hotels, and 12 casinos to its name.
Is there a lesson among the broken souvenirs and the bloodshed?
Probably. Probably several.
The exact same feverish expansion that scared his Hard Rock colleagues ultimately did Earl in on Planet Hollywood, with an attempted 30-percent year-over-year growth. Not that it slowed him down in the end – Earl remains the CEO of Planet Hollywood International, Inc. and still runs other chains like Buca di Beppo.
In 2018, he teamed with Guy Fieri to launch Chicken Guy!, the restaurant that swallowed Planet Hollywood Orlando’s gift shop.
Saturation had more than a little to do with the theme restaurant apocalypse of the early 2000s. The first Disney Planet Hollywood store to fall was On Location in 2010. The Superstore in Hollywood Studios made it all the way to last year. In the thirty years since the boom and twenty since the bust, theme restaurants have come and gone all over Orlando. NBA City. Nascar Café. Tilman Fertitta, owner of Landry’s Restaurants, laid off all staff without warning right before the first wave of coronavirus closures, leading to continued doubt over the fate of chains like Rainforest Café and T-Rex. Disney’s own collection of misfires – Club Disney, DisneyQuest, ESPN Zone, the fabled David Copperfield restaurant at Hollywood Studios – deserves another article entirely.
Food changed, too.
In the early ‘90s, all it took to sell a $10 cheeseburger was Bruce Willis singing his hit in a Planet Hollywood-branded muscle shirt. Sitting beneath a prop butcher knife incorrectly attributed to Halloween III: Season of the Witch didn’t hurt either. The experience mattered more than anything.
These days authenticity matters. You can’t just serve a Chili’s-grade entrée and expect Christopher Lloyd’s flattened corpse from Who Framed Roger Rabbit to justify an extra thirty percent on the bill.
The solution for Planet Hollywood was a change in menu and change of clothes.
Evolution
In 2016, the big blue asteroid at Downtown Disney disappeared beneath a primer-gray tarp. Inside the newly rebranded Planet Hollywood Observatory, there’s no zebra print to be found. Everything’s chic and antiseptic, like a high-end airport bar – not for nothing, the last Planet Hollywood near Hollywood is inside LAX. No wrecked planes hang from the ceiling anymore. There are fewer props period, but the ones left are presented like Smithsonian exhibits. The massive screen across the cardboard cut-out skyline has been replaced with a wall, no more and no less, where music videos that have nothing to do with movies play endlessly. Guy Fieri personally spruced up the culinary offerings. Reviews have improved since the remodel, even if most of the restaurant’s identity was polished off in the process.
As of 2020, only two of the surviving Planet Hollywood restaurants retain their original gonzo style, New York City and Disneyland Paris.
Hard Rock Café hasn’t changed much. Despite the upgrade in venues, it’s still a pub. Still has the stained glass, too. From day one, when two Americans wanted an American burger in Britain and found the name Hard Rock Cafe in the liner notes of a Doors album, it was authentic.
Planet Hollywood Orlando opened with a candy-colored UFO over the front door. Hard Rock Café Orlando opened with the chrome fender of a 50-something Cadillac over theirs.
Movie stars fade, but rock and roll never gets old.
Make sure you pay respects to these veterans while you still can. They don’t seem to be in significant danger of extinction, but if the era that inspired restaurants based on everything from professional wrestling to the band Alabama taught us anything, stranger things have happened.
